625 days of walking

I’ve had my Fitbit for over 625 days. It records walking activity with 5 minute resolution and I’ve carried it around almost everywhere.

So here’s my past 1.7 years of walking in one picture (click to enlarge).

Every column represents five minutes (288 columns from 00:00 to 24:00) and every line represents a single day (625 lines from March 15 2011 to November 28 2012).

Green means no activity and red means high activity (highest intensity red is 706 steps in a 5 minute interval).

What’s immediately visible is when I wind down and go to bed. Then there’s some displacements where I was obviously traveling in a different time zone.

There’s also a trend that I’m not fond of: I seem to be rising earlier and earlier, since the active (yellow/red) band is moving slightly to the left as time progresses.

A quick note on how this was compiled: the data was extracted from the Fitbit website, using the undocumented API that fuels the flash charts (the cookie that serves as auth was copied from the browser’s inspector into the script). I looped through the entire date range and saved every day into a separate XML file. Another quick and dirty script combed through the files with a regex and concatenated all 5-minute intervals in a day into a single comma separated line. The resulting CSV file was then imported into Excel where simple normalization was done, as well as some color coding using conditional formatting. Yes, this is extremely lame, but it was all finished before I could even decide what other tool to use.